I'm at a loss to write any kind of proper goodbye to DAVID BERMAN, the SILVER JEWS and PURPLE MOUNTAINS singer-songwriter who died suddenly Wednesday, on the eve of what would have been his first tour after a decade of near-total seclusion. His struggles with depression, drugs and detachment were no secret among those who knew or followed him, and his discography—six albums with the Joos (frequently in collaboration with his college friend STEPHEN MALKMUS) and one Purple Mountains album released a month ago—is haunted by the specter of death. Haunted may not be quite the right word. Berman alternately faced his mortality, like so much else, with clarity, with black humor, with resignation and with poetry. "Day to day I'm neck and neck with giving in," he sings in the first verse of the first song on the Purple Mountains album. "I'm the same old wreck I've always been." Not being dead could be almost as bad. "In 1984," a Silver Jews album famously begins, "I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.” He was an actual poet in addition to his singing-songwriting gig, and he had a gift, in his songs, for sounding dark when he was trying to be funny and funny when he was trying to be dark. Or maybe, more accurately, he was always trying to be both. He slaved for days over every word in every song, writing and rewriting and scrapping and rerewriting, in search of expression that did in fact approach perfection. And then he could go years or, say, a decade, of not writing a thing, of not even touching a guitar. His life, as has been well-chronicled, was something of a mess, a lonely one at that. He had emerged from that long period of self-imposed seclusion this year to finish the Purple Mountains album, give several lengthy interviews and prepare for that tour, which would have started Saturday in upstate New York. This profile by JOHN LINGAN for the RINGER is definitive and beautiful; it pulls no punches about Berman's many demons but it finds room for optimism, too. There were corners turned and plans to turn more corners ahead. The self-titled Purple Mountains album is a strong, country-rock-tinged, remarkably plain-spoken return. "I don’t have time for language poetry anymore," he told Lingan. "I don’t want to throw people off anymore. I don’t want to bulls***. I want to mean." And now, suddenly, this news, all the more heartbreaking because of all the work he'd done to return, and all the work he left behind. "Hope death equals peace," Stephen Malkmus tweeted Wednesday, "cuz he sure could use it." RIP... RIP also NICKY WONDER, longtime BRIAN WILSON guitarist and co-founder of the WONDERMINTS.